August 19, 2013

Meet eDavid, the Robot Master-Forger

Meet e-David (Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Image Display), a robot who is programmed to copy works of art.

The idea of forgery resonates more than ever today in a culture in which “the open exchange of ideas has been rebranded as piracy,” writes Jonathon Keats, author of Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age.

Technology moves ever-faster to enable the art of our time. Meet e-David (Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Image Display), a robot who is programmed to copy works of art. David is a welding robot that is typically used in auto manufacturing. But his creators have given him extra tools. They write:

…we establish a control loop using the camera in which the output of the robot is captured and new drawing commands are computed that correct the errors of the preceding step. This way we gradually approach a given goal function (a given image).

Watch e-David paint (forge) here:

e-David Robot Painting from eDavid on Vimeo.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

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